The Gray Area with Sean Illing

I’m just going to say it. This may be the most fun I’ve ever had on a podcast. Nora Jemisin — better known by her pen name, N.K. Jemisin — just won the Hugo Award for best novel for the third year in a row. No one had ever done that before. Jemisin is also the first author to have every book in a single series win the Hugo for best novel, and the first black author to win a Hugo for best novel. She’s a badass. What makes Jemisin’s work so remarkable is the power and detail of the worlds she builds for her characters, and her readers, to inhabit. In this podcast, she shows us how she does it: Jemisin teaches a world-building seminar for sci-fi and fantasy authors, and here, she leads me through that exercise live. It’s a master class not only in building a new world but in understanding our own. You don’t want to miss this. Recommended books: The Murderbot Diaries series from Martha Wells Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University and one of the nation’s foremost experts on political corruption. She’s also, after a glowing New York Times endorsement this week, arguably the frontrunner in the race to replace Eric Schneiderman as New York’s attorney general. The Democratic primary, which will likely decide the race, is on September 13. The NY AG position is unusually important right now. President Trump’s businesses are in New York, his family works in New York, his associates worked in New York. When special counsel Robert Mueller referred Michael Cohen for prosecution, it was to New York prosecutors. And for all the talk of Trump’s pardon power, he can pardon against federal prosecution, not state prosecution. All that means that the New York attorney general is uniquely situated to investigate, and prosecute, the corruption swirling around Trumpworld. I had Teachout on this podcast in June 2017. We talked about how political corruption was defined by the Founding Fathers, and why, during the Constitutional Convention, they discussed the threat posed by corruption more than they discussed the threat posed by foreign invasion. And we talked about the way today’s Supreme Court — in the Citizens United and related decisions — has narrowed the definition to be almost meaningless. We also discussed an emoluments lawsuit Teachout was involved in against Trump, as well as the power of corporate monopolies in American life. It was a great conversation then, and it’s all the more relevant now. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

"The future without jobs will come to resemble either the cultivated benevolence of Star Trek or the desperate scramble for resources of Mad Max,” writes Andrew Yang. Well then. Yang is the founder of Venture for America, the author of The War on Normal People, and an outsider candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020. His campaign is based on a grim view of the economy he sees coming: AI, automation, and globalization leading to mass joblessness. The only things that can save us, he says, are a universal basic income (UBI), a redefinition of what work is and how it’s compensated, and a redefinition of how we measure economic and social progress. I’ll be honest. I’m skeptical of the robots-will-take-all-the-jobs thesis that’s took Silicon Valley, and much of the punditariat, by storm. Yang and I debate those doubts, as well as the different arguments for a UBI (and the various ways to finance it). You want big ideas? Here they are. Recommended Books: Give People Money by Annie Lowrey (I promise I did not push Andrew to recommend this!) AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee Squeezed by Alissa Quart Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Marcus Samuelsson is the Michelin-starred chef behind Harlem’s The Red Rooster an award-winning cookbook author,the winner of the first season of Top Chef: Masters, ;nd the host of No Passport Required, a new food and travel show from Eater and PBS. Samuelsson’s story is remarkable. He was born in Ethiopia to a mother who carried him and his sister 75 miles on foot to a hospital when all three of them were suffering from tuberculosis. Samuelsson’s mother died, but he and his sister survived and were adopted by a Swedish family, which is where he grew up. He’s lived and cooked all over the world — Japan, France, Austria, Switzerland — and has a pile of Michelin stars as a testament to his ability to see how the culinary traditions of one place can be informed by another, or introduced to another. This is a conversation about creativity and how diversity powers it. It’s a conversation about what immigration adds to communities, rather than just the role it plays in politics. And it’s a conversation — an emotional one — about what Samuelsson learned from his friend Anthony Bourdain, whose show No Reservations set the template in this space, and whose loss continues to be  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

During the 2016 campaign, Zeynep Tufekci was watching videos of Donald Trump rallies on YouTube. But then, she writes, she "noticed something peculiar. YouTube started to recommend and ‘autoplay' videos for me that featured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.” And it wasn’t just Trump videos. Watching Hillary Clinton rallies got her "arguments about the existence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behind the attacks of Sept. 11.” Nor was it just politics. "Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons." Tufekci is a New York Times columnist and a professor at the University of North Carolina. She’s also one of the clearest thinkers around on how digital platforms work, how their algorithms understand and shape our preferences, and what the consequences are for society. So as we learn that Facebook is detecting new efforts at electoral manipulation and as we watch online politics become ever more bitter and divisive, I wanted to talk with Tufekci about how digital platforms have become engines of radicalization, and what we can do about it. Recommended books: The Control Revolution by James Beniger Ruling the Waves by Debora Spar Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The question of whether President Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election has consumed Washington since the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller special counsel in March 2017. But there's another question worth considering: the financial corruption swirling around Trump’s businesses, and now his administration. In any other White House, this would be the ongoing, constant story — the site of endless investigations and inquiries. And it still might be. We know Mueller is looking into the web of financial ties between Trump’s businesses and the post-Soviet bloc, and we know that part of the Mueller investigation gets Trump particularly outraged. Plus, we still don’t know what’s on Trump’s tax returns, or what could be discovered if Democrats take back a chamber of Congress and get subpoena power. Here’s my bet: If there is some scandal lurking that’s going to derail the Trump administration, I think it’s going to be found by following the money, not by following the Russian bots. Adam Davidson has been investigating this since Trump's election. If you're an avid podcast listener, you probably know Adam from his days at Planet Money. He's now at the New Yorker, doing some of the best investigative work on the Trump Organization. You’ll want to hear what he’s found.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We talk a lot on this podcast about the epic levels of political polarization and how much of our ongoing breakdown they explain. But what was American politics like before it was polarized? And what got us from there to here? Sam Rosenfeld is a political scientist at Colgate University and author of the book The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era. I’ve read a lot of books on polarization, and Rosenfeld’s is the best I’ve seen at painting a picture of what American politics looked like before Republican meant conservative and Democrat meant liberal, and why polarization seemed like a good, necessary thing to many of the people who drove it. While you listen to this history, try to think about it not from the perspective of someone sitting in 2018, looking at a political system in crisis, but someone in 1955, observing a system that offered nothing but false and confusing choices. Would you have been on the side of the polarizers? Recommended books: On Capitol Hill by Julian Zelizer Making Minnesota Liberal by Jennifer Delton Social Policy in the United States by Theda Skocpol Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

America is changing. A majority of infants are, for the first time in US history, nonwhite — and the rest of the population is expected to follow suit in the coming decades. The number of religiously affiliated Americans is at a record low, and the share of foreign-born residents is at a historically high level. What happens to a country amid this kind of demographic change and strain? What does it do to our politics, to our identities, to our worldview? I’ve come to believe that you can’t understand politics in America right now without understanding these changes and how they act on us psychologically. And to understand these changes, you need to talk to Yale psychologist Jennifer Richeson, who has done pioneering work on the way perceptions of demographic threat and change affect people’s political opinions, voting behavior, and ideas about themselves. I believe this is one of the most important conversations I’ve had on this podcast for understanding America today — and I also know it’s just the start of trying to understand these questions. Enjoy. Recommended books: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson (who was also on EKS) Change They Can't Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America by Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics by Ryan Enos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For decades, Harvard’s Dani Rodrik has been a lonely voice in the economics profession warning that the academics were getting this one wrong. Trade is not an unalloyed good; “globalization would deepen societal divisions, exacerbate distributional problems, and undermine domestic social bargains,” Rodrik warned. But few listened. The tendency to emphasize trade’s benefits while ignoring its costs created a massive political backlash. “Economists would have had a greater—and much more positive—impact on the public debate had they stuck closer to their discipline’s teaching, instead of siding with globalization’s cheerleaders,” Rodrik wrote in his excellent book, Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy. Rodrik isn’t just a rock thrower. He’s a professor of international political economy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the president-elect of the International Economic Association. And so, as Trump’s trade war begins, I asked him on the show to explain what politicians and economists have gotten so wrong about trade, and what it would mean to get it right. Recommended books (and an article): Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality by James Kwak Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium by Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order” by John Ruggie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute and launching a new podcast on the art and practice of disagreement, shares insights on how to disagree better, the importance of expressing healthy anger, and the detrimental effects of contempt in politics and society. He discusses the impact of snark and contempt on constructive disagreement, the difference between civility and uncivil disagreement on social media platforms, and the growing division in society. Despite the challenges, Brooks believes that the crisis presents an opportunity for improvement.